by Seth Jacob
I almost gave up looking for anything of any importance when I found a single black sock with my father’s initials in gold thread instead of blue. It seemed a little weird, so I started to pick up the sock to see if maybe there was something inside of it, when I realized that it was caught on something. I didn’t want to pull too hard and rip it, so I cleared away the other socks and saw that there was a metallic wire attached to the heel of the sock. The wire led into the back of the drawer where it disappeared through a small, almost pinhole sized opening in the wood.
I gently tugged on the wire, and there was a loud clank like a giant door was unlocking. The entire dresser shifted a few inches away from the wall. I pulled on the back of the dresser, and it pivoted away from the wall on hinges. The unusually tall dresser was blocking the opening to the huge walk in closet, and I was confronted by what looked like a miniature superhero headquarters.
A wall of the room was plastered with clippings from the career of Jack Titan. One article was from early in my father’s career and it had a photograph of him as a young man. The headline read “Jack Titan Apprehends The Punster” and the photograph showed him in his Jack Titan costume. It was so bizarre to see him, maybe only a few years older than I was then, decked out in this Greek warrior themed superhero costume. It consisted of a tight fitting toga with gold embroidering, leather greaves on his shins and bronze braces on his forearms, a golden mask and a golden wreath atop a head of long, curly brown hair that was gray my entire life, and a silver chest plate. The silver chest plate had bold, stylized “JT” symbols etched onto both shoulders. The photographer had caught him right as he was flinging his golden sling.
The wall of this small room was teeming with clippings from newspapers, magazines, and even a bunch of print outs from online news sources spanning Jack Titan’s entire career. When the lawyer told me that my father was Jack Titan, I recognized the name, but I thought that he was a relatively obscure superhero. This wall of clippings told a different story. They spelled out the narrative of my father’s career from a low level costumed crimefighter to a respected mainstay of the superhero community. I was dumbfounded by the amount of material here. I could have spent months reading over the myriad articles. It was too much to take in all at once, but it was easy to see that a thread ran through the narrative in front of me. Over and over again, Jack Titan faced The Punster.
I wasn’t familiar with The Punster, but there were dozens of headlines detailing their various encounters. There were a few pictures of the supervillain. He was a skinny, bald man in a purple turtleneck with a big, gaudy green “P!” emblazoned on the chest, and he had a creepy look of crazed enthusiasm. The crimes he committed were all pun themed, and the headline writers clearly had their fun with that. There were article titles like, “Jack Titan Squishes Punster’s ‘Play Dough’ Counterfeiting Scheme”, “The Punster’s Giant ‘Antdroid’ Bugs Downtown,”, and, “Jack Titan Testifies Against Punster, Gives Him a Pun for his Money.”
It was obvious that this hidden room was where my father had been spending the majority of his time. There was a mattress on the floor with a crumpled blanket on it, empty water bottles were strewn everywhere, a pile of protein bar wrappers had built up in the corner, and there were more than a few used up vials of soup. There was none of the sterile, impossibly clean order that characterized the rest of the apartment. I stepped over the mattress and the insane amount of empty soup vials littered around it. There were enough of them to put a small whale into a coma, and I tried to ignore them as I made my way to the back wall of the room where I saw his Jack Titan apparel.
His silver chest plate hung on a hook on the wall, and on closer inspection, I could see that it was a slab of kevlar coated in shiny paint. His golden mask and wreath dangled on a hook next to the chest plate. The rest of his armor, the greaves, the bronze braces, and a pair of Grecian sandals sat on a narrow shelf built into the wall. There was a heap of his golden slings, at least twenty of them, at the far end of the shelf. Underneath the shelf, there was a big cardboard box.
The box was labeled “Trophy Room” in black marker. If I could have spent months reading through all the articles pinned to the wall, then I could have spent a lifetime poring over the stuff packed into that box. It looked like my father saved everything. The first thing that I noticed was a brittle, ancient plastic ID badge from his participation in the Harvard SUHP project in the early 60’s. His eighteen year old, beardless baby face awkwardly smiled at me on the yellowing ID badge. He looked impossibly young, almost a decade younger than I was at that moment, and it was unreal for me to see the undeniable proof that my dad was once the opposite of the stoic, aloof adult that I always knew.
There were countless photographs of my father scattered throughout that box. A lot of them were from so early on in his superhero career that they were still in black and white. His Jack Titan costume in those first years was so bad that it looked like it was held together by tape and paper clips. His beard hadn’t really filled in yet, and he was holding his Golden Sling clumsily, like he couldn’t even pretend that he knew how to use it correctly…but in each of those photos, he looked so happy. Even in black and white, it was easy to see that excitement, that electrifying thrill of putting on a silly costume and transforming into more than a normal person, that charge of confidence you get when your absurd outfit screams at the world, “I am a superhero, I dare you to tell me I’m not!” It was easy to recognize it on his boyish face, even through his cheap, spray painted gold mask, because I’d had the same look on my own face.
There were piles and piles of photos of him with other superheroes, some of whom I recognized, and others that I had never even heard of who must have faded away into obscurity over the decades. My dad, having the time of his life at hole in the wall bars and house parties with superheroes who are living legends today. Drunk and smiling with his arm around Beyond Man. Sitting at a dirty bar with Queen Quantum, years before she could afford to bedazzle her Cosmic Crown with real four karat diamonds. I saw him with global icons like Doc Hyper and Sleight of Hand and even Anhur, who hated to be photographed unless he was with a beautiful woman, beating a supervillain to a pulp, or both.
I saw him in candid snapshots with the people who went on to become the founding members of the Superb 6 and some of the most iconic superheroes in the history of costumed crimefighting. Today, you never see photographic evidence of these people cutting loose like this, and believe me, armies of paparazzi have tried. Today, you’ll see them on the cover of magazines and on billboards and if you’re lucky, flying up in the sky above you, but you won’t see them gawkily dancing in dive bars with people like my dad. It was so weird to see these people like that, these celebrities who we look at like gods watching over us in their Superb 6 satellite, but back then, they were all just a bunch of goofy kids.
I flipped through the stacks of photographs, and it was like looking through a slide show of my dad’s entire life. I saw him grow up from a teenage superhero, just an amateur in a bed sheet toga and a card board chest plate, to a full fledged professional in his mid twenties with a tailor made costume that was so good that he really did look like a Titan plucked right out of Greek Mythology. I saw him grow older and older and I saw that look, that pure, vibrant joy of being a superhero, melt from his face. And finally, I saw pictures of my dad approaching the age he was when I was born, and that somber, poker faced man that I knew showed his face.
And then there were the mementos, the endless mementos. The limited edition Jack Titan action figure, complete with 8 points of articulation, real removable metal armor, and sling throwing action. A ticket stub from the premiere of the Beyond Man movie. An invitation to the opening of the Kirby Museum of Superhero History. There was a compound camera eye from The Punster’s giant rampaging insect robot, his “Antroid.” A shiny green scale from one of Dragon General’s wings, and one of The Abnormalite’s razor sharp fangs, which made me a little proud, because my dad probably punched it
right out of that monster’s mouth. There was a note from Mistress Gorgon that was half love letter, and half death threat. And there was a pair of brass knuckles with an engraving from Anhur that read, “To Jack Titan: May your fist be blessed by Ra, and hit as hard as the Titans of old.” There were so many more wonderful things in there, so many weird trinkets and trophies. Everything that my dad kept from an entire lifetime of costumed crimefighting was crammed into that box.
Then, beneath all of the photos, beneath the mountains of relics saved over the course of my dad’s whole life, I found the mother lode. I found dozens of spiral notebooks buried at the bottom of that box, and each of them was filled with his writing about his life as a superhero. Everything he ever did in costume, he wrote about. There couldn’t have been less than half a million words in those notebooks. I skimmed through one of them, and I read about things as mundane as stopping Dragon General and his Reptilian Guard from robbing an armored car, and as downright psychedelic as the time Doctor Delusion dosed him and the Superb 6 with his hallucinogenic, SUHP tipped daydream darts. I flipped through the hundreds of pages of my father’s hand written notes, and it hit me. He was really gone. These notebooks, they were all that was left.
I lost track of time while I looked through that box. I realized that it contained everything of my father’s that I wanted to keep. If anything remained of him, it wasn’t in the antiseptic apartment outside of that room. It was pinned up to those walls, and it was stuffed into that box marked Trophy Room. Everything outside of that hidden room could be sold for whatever cash I could get for it, but the things on those walls and in that box were priceless and irreplaceable. I gathered up all of the articles on the walls, I took his Golden Slings, his wreath and mask, his pieces of armor, and I threw it all in that box marked Trophy Room. The last chance to know my father that I had consisted of everything in that cardboard box, and the worst part is that I didn’t even know how important it was to me until it was taken away.
Chapter 4: On the House
“Sorry kid, we’re at capacity.” The bouncer outside of “The Flasked Crusader” took one look at me, and the scowl on his face made it obvious that he wasn’t even going to consider letting me into the bar.
The bar was in a part of town that even a superhero doesn’t want to be in after dark, and I was there because of a matchbox I had found in the box of my father’s stuff. The matchbox was at the top of the mountains of things jammed into the box, and it had a recent date and time written on it in his handwriting. I thought that he must have met someone there recently, and if I wanted find out more about my father, going to one of his regular hangouts was probably a good place to start. I was intimidated by how much material was in that box, but I thought if I could talk to someone he actually knew, if I could sit down and just have a conversation with someone he might have even considered a friend, that would be better than studying his volumes of scribbles. I thought wrong.
“Uh, there’s no way you can let me in?” I asked him, and I looked around at the deserted street outside of the Flasked Crusader. No one was trying to get into this dive.
“I said get out of my face,” the bouncer said, and he turned his attention back to his phone. He was a big guy…six and a half feet tall and two hundred and fifty pounds if he weighed an ounce. Normally, that wouldn’t faze me (size isn’t a factor when you’ve got super strength), but his skin was also a thick hide of blueish green scales. He was a superhuman, and I couldn’t be sure what his abilities were. Maybe he could just breath under water. Or maybe he could breath fire.
“I guess this is a waste of time, but can you tell me why you—”
“Yo, I’m not gonna say this again. This place isn’t for you. Look at you, you’re a hipster vigilante, you’re a little snot nosed do gooder and I don’t need you startin’ any shit with some of the less than heroic types in this establishment. So walk. Now.” The bouncer glared at me, and the snake-like, slit pupils of his eyes made his stare even more intense. After a good ten seconds of this, he looked back at his phone and it was as if I wasn’t even standing there.
I considered slipping the guy some money to get in, but after a pocket search, I realized that I hadn’t brought any cash. I just had my Millennials team credit card which was issued to me by the Crimefighter Credit Union. The Crimefighter Credit Union, or the CCU, handles the banking for the entire superhero community. It was established to protect everyone’s secret identities from corporately owned banks, and to process the checks we collect from the government for catching supervillains with warrants on their heads. The whole superhero-industrial complex would collapse without the CCU, but the credit card they issued me wasn’t going to convince this charming gentlemen to do me any favors.
“Hey man, I’m really not going to cause any trouble, I just want to get a drink inside…”
The bouncer looked up at me, and then he spit on the sidewalk. His spit was hot pink, and the asphalt sizzled where it landed. A few seconds later, his acidic loogie had burned a hole right through the sidewalk.
“Next one’s in your eye,” the bouncer cleared his throat, and then he was right back to his phone.
I was about to give up and walk away when I happened to catch a glimpse of his phone screen. He was looking at Professor Dinosaur’s website, a supervillain that The Millennials had put behind bars twice in the past year. I recognized it from Professor Dinosaur’s distinctive symbol, a stylized T-Rex brand that the scaly villain wore on his tweed jacket like the crest of some nonexistent dinosaur university.
“It’s none of my business, but if you’re thinking about applying to be Professor Dinosaur’s henchman, I’d reconsider. You’re better off being a bouncer,” I remarked, and then I marched away, pissed off that this guy was forcing me to give up on this lead.
“Wait wait, hold up kid, why d’you say that?” The bouncer called after me, and I stopped walking.
“Nothing, don’t worry about it man,” I bent my knees and hunched down as I prepared to leap away from this god forsaken hell hole of a bar. Just as I was about to jump, a huge scale covered hand fell on my shoulder and held me to the ground.
“Seriously bro, what’s wrong with being this Dino guy’s henchman?” The bouncer’s eyes were filled with a childlike curiosity that clashed with his predatory reptilian pupils.
I brushed his hand off my shoulder and tried to hide the chills that ran through me when I scraped his gross snake skin.
“Here’s the thing about Professor Dinosaur: he’s sloppy as fuck. The superhero group I’m with, we’ve caught this guy a few times and it’s embarrassingly easy. Almost doesn’t seem fair,” I answered.
“So what? All these villain douchebags get caught. I just want some quick, easy money,” the bouncer leaned against the wall and resumed ignoring me, but with a dash of disappointment that I couldn’t give him any useful information on his potential employer.
Doubt paralyzed me. I could give this guy advice, and he might let me into the Flasked Crusader, but then he would end up being a more effective henchman for a more dangerous supervillain. If he worked for Professor Dinosaur, that pretentious faux-intellectual would all but guarantee that this bouncer would end up in jail, probably in some half baked attempt to steal a stegosaurus skeleton. I should have walked away, but I just had to know why my dad would come to this place.
“Professor Dinosaur doesn’t really pay that well…that’s why he’s constantly getting caught. His henchman are always these inexperienced, young guys.”
I had the bouncer’s attention again.
“You’re trying to get work with a, ahm, you know, a reptile themed guy right? If I were you, I’d take a look at Dragon General.”
“Why? Why Dragon General instead of this dinosaur guy?”
“Dragon General’s slippery. Dude’s hard to catch, not like Professor Dinosaur. Dinosaur’s always taking hostages and trying to hurt civilians…that shit’s fucked up. And it gets the attention of a lot of heroes. Dragon Ge
neral’s different. He’s efficient, he just gets his money then he splits, he’s not interested in taking out his frustrations on regular people.”
The bouncer was intrigued, and I was already regretting this, but I’d gone too far to stop now.
“Plus, all Dragon General’s henchmen have good teeth.”
“Uh…” The bouncer was confused.
“Good dental. He calls his henchmen his Reptilian Guard, and I’m pretty sure he keeps the same dudes on staff. That means the pay’s good enough to keep them around. You’re superhuman too, so I bet you’d be like a henchman officer or some shit. Better pay, maybe?”
The bouncer squinted at me. I think he was trying to figure out if I was making fun of him, and for what felt like forever, he didn’t say anything. I thought he was going to hit me.
“You’re alright, kid,” he slapped me on the shoulder with one of his meaty, snake skinned hands.
I talked with the bouncer for a few more minutes, just shooting the shit with the guy, and it occurred to me that I’d probably be fighting him sometime in the near future. Turns out his name was Joel, and although he seemed like a nice enough dude once you got past his whole tough guy schtick, I wouldn’t want him coughing up that hot pink acid on me. He finally let me into the Flasked Crusader, and as soon as I stepped foot in the place, I knew that I was so far out of my element that I might as well be in another dimension. It was dimly lit, grimy, and it smelled like hard liquor, blood, and energy blasts. The youngest person in the bar had to be double my age, and although nearly everyone there was in costume, I didn’t recognize most of them. I walked towards the bar and from the dirty looks I was getting, it was abundantly clear that I was not welcome there.